What do you get when you dip your little finger into a bottle of writing fluid? An inky pinky. Looking for an entertaining way to sharpen both your ear for rhyme and your skill in defining words? Try the Inky Pinky game. In Inky Pinky, the first player offers a concise, clear definition, and […]
Child film star Shirley Temple wrote, “I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph.” It’s fun to look at the holiday through the innocent eyes of children: A mother was pleased with the Christmas card her […]
Frosty the Snowman and his wife live in an icicle built for two in the Snow Belt on the snow banks of Lake Snowbegone. Where they live, it’s so cold that Starbucks serves coffee on a stick! It’s so cold that people have to scrape the ice off their glasses! It’s so cold that […]
Here’s little poem I’ve conjured up about Halloween monsters: Don’t ever play ping pong with King Kong. Don’t ever take blood tests with Dracula. Don’t you dare give a wedgie to Frankenstein. Your ending will be quite spectaculah! Don’t you dare snap a towel at Godzilla. Such a prank would be foolishly rude. Don’t you […]
DEAR RICHARD: Contemplating the spread of laboratory-grown, humane meat, I began to imagine a menu for such delectables: Faux-let Mignon, Fakin’, Top Sir-lyin’, Paté Faux Gras, Not Roast, Cloned Beef & Cabbage, Spore Ribs, Prankfurters, Not Dogs, Honey-Baked Sham, Saw-such, Nutton, Chicken Winks, Presto Duck, Cheatloaf, Not Worst, Shadow Briand, and Fauxlish Sawsuch. -Linda […]
Having opened on July 21, “Barbie” has become the highest grossing film of this year and the first billion-dollar film directed by a woman (Greta Gerwig). The “Pink Fever” that the neon-coated fantasy comedy movie has created could ultimately gross two billion dollars. Barbie is the most popular doll in the history of toydom. […]
William Shakespeare began his comedy Twelfth Night with the line “If music be the food of love, play on!” About a century later, the playwright William Congreve opened his comedy The Mourning Bride with the equally famous line “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast” (almost always misquoted as “the savage beast”). If […]
DEAR RICHARD LEDERER: I was gobsmacked (a fun word too) to hear for the first time the word bafflegab, which means exactly what it sounds like. Unfortunately, there’s so much of it these days. –Cindy Veinot, Chicago Bafflegab, which entered American English in 1952, does indeed mean “unintelligible jargon.” Words that describe words that […]
I’m button-burstingly proud to announce that today marks the 11th anniversary of my sharing “Lederer on Language” with you word-loving, verbivorous readers. So I’m giving you all an air hug. When is enough not enough? Well, enough is a six-letter word. Take the first three letters — e-n-o, anagram them, and you will get […]
Peter Fitzgerald, of Imperial Beach, shares his take on punning with a Shakespearean twist: “All the world’s a pun and all the men and women merely players with words.” How true. My invitation for you readers to wing me your original puns generated a veritable tsunami of submissions. I’ve placed 20 additional readers’ puns […]